Inergi preserves history, recycles items in its 80-plus-year-old home

Bob Gathany/The Huntsville TimesAustin Boyd, CEO of Inergi, stands by the original Martin Stamping and Stove air compressor.The brick building on the west end of Governors Drive is so large that it's easy to get lost in, examining item after item from Huntsville's early years of manufacturing.Wandering through another dark and cavernous section on the ground floor of the building, Inergi CEO Austin Boyd says, "I call this the Pentagon of Huntsville."This is a building with 252,000 square feet - the equivalent of a 5 1/2-acre facility. This is a building so large that it houses the original iron from the Statue of Liberty, renovated in 1986.The iron is under contract to a company that's operated by a Huntsville resident. Inergi stores it, and receives approval from the U.S. National Park System and the Ellis Island Foundation when it wants to do something with the iron, such as stamping it in glass replicas of the Statue of Liberty.Much of Inergi is devoted to history and the preservation of history. Inergi is a design and exhibit company that's housed in one of the city's early manufacturing icons, the former Martin Stamping and Stove Company building.Inergi purchased the building around 2000. About six years later, the company began to renovate the building, built in the late 1920s.In 2008, the company began moving into the renovated sections of the building, many of them on the upper floors. This year, the renovation was expanded to include GreenInergi, the company's recycling project.A few weeks after Boyd took over as CEO in February, he met with Derek McGuire, one of the company's retail fabricators."There's a lot of money in this building," Boyd recalled McGuire saying. "We ought to do something about it."From there, Boyd and McGuire went to Tennessee Valley Recycling on Triana Boulevard, the former site of L. Miller & Son. Boyd saw people recycling items for $10 a load.Watching the scene, McGuire told Boyd there were thousands and thousands of dollars worth of metal in the Inergi plant, much of it left over from the Martin Stamping and Stove era.Soon, Boyd discovered there were miles of copper wire and hundreds of tons of steel that weren't being used."What we're trying to do is bring all the (recyclable) metal out of the plant and make it a safer plant," he said. "It's amazing the difference."One day last week, for instance, 10 old fans were found. Some new motors were installed, and the fans were in use again."It's like hooking up old blood vessels and bringing it back to life with a triple bypass," Boyd said. "Plus, we're able to do environmentally conscious things."Backyard maintenanceTo Boyd, once a space engineer and former astronaut finalist with John Glenn-like enthusiasm, the project is an example of "taking care of your backyard.""We shouldn't wait for someone to bring money to Huntsville," he said. "What can we do to fix our own problems? When you do that, you don't need Washington to solve problems."There are little pockets all over town of people who want to do things."As an example, he cites the Lincoln Mills project in northwest Huntsville, where about $9 million is expected to be poured into the renovation of the old textile mill on Meridian Street."We can do Lincoln Villages all over Huntsville," he said.In the past three weeks, Boyd said, company officials have removed 3,000 pounds of copper and about eight tons of steel, resulting in about $10,000 in recycled copper and about $3,000 in recycled steel."I didn't just want cash," he said. "I wanted to fix the building. I look around town at the metal that's sitting around, and I realize that we're all sitting on this amazing resource that we're not doing anything with."By the end of the summer, perhaps August, Boyd expects most of the metal to be removed.In the fall, he anticipates having a museum on the ground floor, a tribute to the era of Martin Stamping and Stove, which closed its Huntsville facility in 2000.For years, Boyd said, there was no vision for the facility. A lot of homeless people lived in the building, he said."They didn't realize what they were sitting on," he said.All of that began to change in 2006, when Davis Lee became a major company investor.Now, there is vision, even in some of the company's dark, cavernous areas."This is the old garage," Boyd said, entering a large building on the east side of the building. "Everything you see here goes, except this."He stops by the original air compressor from the Martin Stamping and Stove days.Boyd's plan for the old compressor is to put it on a pad in front of the building, along with a plaque that commemorates the site as the original home of Martin Stamping and Stove."This," he said, "is too cool."